


Developmental Beta: When Crit Gets Real

by Developmental_Beta (Emmessann), Medeafic



Series: Real-Life Examples [2]
Category: Original Work, Star Trek RPF
Genre: Beta-Reading, Developmental Beta-Reading, Developmental Editing, Gen, Kink Meme, M/M, Meta, Writing, collar kink, editing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-30
Updated: 2014-11-30
Packaged: 2018-02-27 14:31:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2696405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emmessann/pseuds/Developmental_Beta, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Medeafic/pseuds/Medeafic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The shared story of an author and beta hitting the first difficult critique of a fic, and how they survived it</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. When Crit Hits the Fanfic

**Author's Note:**

> The non-fiction writer & beta story is vanilla gen. There are a few excerpts from a collar-kink fic which are marked, and not necessary to understand the main narrative.

When you start a beta relationship with an author, there are a few milestones you are bound to pass if your collaboration survives for any length of time. As luck would have it, [Medea ](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Medeafic/pseuds/Medeafic)and I went through the most important trial together, on the second story she sent me. The milestone: serious critique.

When you have a significant issue with a story, it's a make-or-break moment for a beta. Either I handled the concrit deftly, or I didn't. Either Medea accepted the response and stayed with me, or she wouldn't. When I hit "send" on my comments, I knew perfectly well that this could be the last I heard from my newest author. In a long relationship a developmental beta and writer are bound to hit this turning point. It's not really about right or wrong, it's about how we each handle the issue and each other. Weathering the moment when crit gets real is crucial to build a working relationship.

**Before The Fall**

The first story Medea sent me was a quickie that I really enjoyed -- [Auteur](http://archiveofourown.org/works/156436), a Hitchcock pastiche with JJ Abrams directing Star Trek while obsessing over Zach as if he was a Hitchcock Blonde. My comments were basically "LOL" and "Chris reminds me of Cary Grant in his Hitchcock Cad days." Easy-peasy.

But Medea’s home base as a fan writer is hardcore BDSM kink. Now, I knew this when I beta-married her -- it's what [Captain Spanky](http://archiveofourown.org/series/6446), her long series that drew me in had been, and I loved it.

I know now that long series was something Medea took seriously. She probably rewrote every section four to six times, because when she's writing seriously that's how she rolls. On the other hand, the collar-kink fic she sent me for our second try at beta was a very quick kink meme fill.

#### The kink meme request

> _“I really really really want CFine in a collar. [...] I obviously want Zachary to be the one who put it there. I want Chris to feel unbalanced and like, unnerved when he's not wearing it, and the thought of Zachary asking him to remove it - unsettles him. He kind of like, needs the collar to feel safe and secure. Or something. And I want Zachary to go a little ballistic if anyone but him and Chris touch it. [...]”_

**Intro to the First Draft Beta Request**

> _It's about 1880 words.  I think it’s a bit OOC but I don't know if I mind too much about that, given that it's the kink meme.  What do you think?  It's not very funny, either, which I miss, but oh well.  If it totally sucks I'll just post it anonymously._

**Draft One: Beta Hard**

(Emmessann)

If I got this beta request today, as best practices I would take the following into account:

  1. this is for the kink meme
  2. the prompter's request is quite clear, and pretty dark
  3. Medea doesn't sound like this is a do-or-die fic for her.



I can’t say I was great at these best practices then. At the time, I tended to give 110% on every beta, and I wish I'd had a bit more perspective to scale back when appropriate. These days, I'm trying harder to limit what I do to what's needed and wanted. Instead, my attitude at this point was more like "I assume that if you sent me this kink-meme fill to beta, the job you wanted from me was to beta away and help you make it the very best kink-meme fill it can possibly be." Also, even with meme fills, I tend to think of how they will speak to a wider audience.

So, here is one excerpt from the original draft, with a few of my comments.

**Draft One: Collar Fic**

> "As  much as I want it on you always, you have to give your skin a break from time to time.  If it starts chafing, you’ll start scratching, you know you will.  It might get infected, and then where would you be?  Hm?  Collarless, that’s where.  For a long time.  So do as I say."
> 
> He’s kneeling in front of me, but his face is tilted up to look at me.  I can see from the hard line he’s made of his full, pink lips that he wants to argue.  But then he looks at the floor instead and inclines his head down, obedient.  I slip the small key into the fitted steel plate at the back of his neck, click the lock, and the collar opens.  I remove it from him, ignoring his stifled moan of disappointment.

[On set, the director and crew want Chris to remove the collar.  He freaks out and refuses.  Zach’s called to intervene.]

> He’s almost in tears, his face red and irate.  “I won’t,” he says.  “I’m not going to do it.  After all of last night – not today as well.”
> 
> “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I say, and hug him close.  He’s shivering, although he’s fully dressed for the shoot, including a jacket.  “It wouldn’t be for long.”
> 
> “Please don’t make me.”  His mouth is muffled in my shoulder, and I think about my responsibilities.  What is the priority here?  His heart or his career? [Emm 4]

**Beta Comment**

> [Emm4] Um...it seems to me like they’re both on the line at the moment, and really not in a good way.  I find it disconcerting that Zach is seeing this as the choice – that maintaining the collar is _good_ for Chris’s “heart.”
> 
> If Zach was functioning responsibly here, I would think his reaction might be:  
> 
>   1. horror that the collar is affecting Chris this badly, plus fear that they’ve gone too far and actually damaged Chris, rendering him less able to deal with ordinary life
>   2. an uneasy feeling of compromise if the idea is that Chris was somehow worse than this before the collar, and despite appearances the collar is making some bad things better
>   3. Or, the idea is that Zach is too lost in this scene to function rationally and make good decisions himself, as well.
> 


**The Crit Hits The Fanfic**

Here are excerpts from our emailed discussion that accompanied my comments.

> Hiya, Medea --
> 
> I don't _think_ I'm opposed to collar fic -- it's not my kink, but I've read it in plenty of stories -- but as you'll see I had a little trouble following Zach and Chris and approving/accepting the way they seemed to want me to.  I get the feeling that for someone who does have collaring as their kink, this may hit the spot exactly as it is.  Although I spend a lot of words trying to work out my own response to it, IMO if you wanted to post it as-is now, you totally could.
> 
> My take on the story goes in several different directions at once, and I feel like you could push the story farther into any one of those directions.
> 
>   1. Least resistance: ease up on Chris’s dependency
>   2. Morally gray-area: show that Chris is better off with the collar even if it limits him
>   3. Darkfic: Chris and Zach are destructively/happily immersed, but the reader can see there are problems.
> 

> 
> As someone not in the scene, the impression I come away with is that what Chris and Zach are doing is psychologically unhealthy, because it appears to be, in and of itself, taking away Chris's ability to function in his everyday life -- like if they hadn't started down this path, he would have been just fine at his photo shoot.  Furthermore, Zach comes across as being in denial that this is as big of a problem as it actually would be, which makes me feel like he's not living up to his responsibilities to Chris.
> 
> So...a couple different possible directions, taking more or less effort to implement.  Don't forget that the lowest-effort approach is "just post it and get it out there" -- for all my verbiage, I'd be totally supportive of that choice. 

**A Beta’s Buried Anxieties**

So that was the heart of my response as beta.  I have a feeling some authors reading it are feeling short of breath right now, and giving thanks they’ve never met me.  All this, for a _kink meme fill?_

The main reason I took it so far was a type of beta-protectiveness. I’ll expand these points when I talk about Fail, but I was inwardly concerned that this was the type of fic that unexpectedly touches a nerve and starts a sprawling online conflict with a humiliated author at the center. Unlikely, I’m sure, but I read with an ear out for the possibility. There’d been a massive pan-fandom BDSM discussion along those lines about a year before, and it was centered on agency, "true" BDSM, and not causing lasting damage with play. The fraught conversation had left an impression, and I worried how the collar fic would come across.

However, as I said: I am not in the scene, but my Sherlock-like powers of deduction coupled with my ability to read had led me to intuit that Medea probably was. :) Another thing that’s buried deep between the lines of my response is that I would absolutely defer to her truth on the subject. It’s one reason I kept encouraging her to post as-was, if she wanted. If this story _needed_ to be about an abased guy utterly ruled by his collar, then it should be, with warnings attached. I wanted to tread cautiously, with the many options, because I had no idea how committed she was to this particular vision of play. When it comes to writing someone's truth, I say warn, and write whatever’s necessary.

In all, my response was probably longer than the fic, and I sent it off with a trepidatious "Well, there it goes."


	2. The Stages of Concrit: Denial, Anger...Acceptance?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the author receives and processes the strong critique, and Lessons Are Learned all around

**The Stages of Concrit: Denial, Anger, Bargaining...**

(Medea)

I remember exactly when I read Emm's email. I was at work, on my lunchbreak, in the cafeteria of a government department, and I'd been in incredibly boring meetings with public servants all morning. I was also in the last throes of my postgraduate degree. Writing fic had been a way for me to leave behind the stresses of academia and the savage criticism that often comes along with putting your intellectual work out there for other people to read.

The other thing I should add is that this was the second fic Emm had beta read for me. As she says, the first was a fic about JJ Abrams becoming an accidental voyeur, with satirical, Hitchcockian overtones. (Basically, he was perving on Pinto.) When I got that draft back from Emm, she only had a few suggested tweaks and the rest were I LOVE THIS and THIS IS AMAZING etc. I was more or less expecting the same for the Collar fic.

Noooooope.

The other thing that bit me in the ass was, when Emm first approached me to beta and we talked about expectations, her process, my process, etc etc, I’d thrown caution to the wind. "I can totally take whatever crit you give!" I boasted. "I'm used to academics tearing my stuff apart, and there's no way it can be as bad as that!" I also worked in a professional comms role for my day job, and edits, criticisms and feedback on work from that has always been water off a duck's back.

I sent this fic to Emm with the assumption that it would not need much editing. It filled the prompt, and it filled my personal writing needs at the time, which were: something small, something kinky, something simple to write after finishing a long and emotionally complex series. I was also gearing up to write a sequel to that series, and was in the planning stages.

In fact, this kink meme fill was also partly intended as a test case for my new beta. The long series I was planning was my baby, and I expected to work with her closely on that, but I was still a little gun-shy about exactly what a beta might add to my work. I wanted to get more of a sense of how she worked--and of course, more I LOVE THIS! SQUEE! comments, because they made me feel good. I assumed that any critiques would be easy enough to deal with, and I assumed that I wouldn't care much about the critique anyway, because this fic wasn't imbued with my heart and soul like my long series had been.

What I’d completely failed to take into account was this: writing fiction is not like writing a critique on mid-eighteenth century gender politics, or firming up a workplace policy on health and safety. Writing fiction means you have to put a part of yourself down on paper, and getting criticism and feedback on that hurts and processes in a very different way than criticism on, say, an essay, or your work performance, or your driving.

So there I sat in this depressing café, with my tasteless salad-and-cheese roll, reading about everything that was wrong with my fic. Wrong with me.

It did not feel great.

My first reaction—and honestly? This is still always and probably ever shall be my first reaction, 'cause I have an Ego that just won't quit—was to think, "Well, clearly, SHE IS MISTAKEN. This is a work of genius, dripping forth from my fingers like ichor from the veins of the very Gods themselves!"

My second reaction was "Shut the hell up and have another look at the fic." So I did, and I still didn't think it was SO TOTALLY AWFUL.

The problem was, the crit itself wasn't actually that bad. Nor was it in any way a criticism of me or who I am as a person. But my Ego was still in total control, and it wouldn't have accepted anything other than "This is better than Shakespeare; post it immediately." 

I emailed Emm back and told her I’d consider her points:

_[It is an exercise for the reader to find any hint of Medea’s inner turmoil in the messages she sent me. Hand to God, this is the first time I've ever heard about most of it. -- Emmessann]_

**First Reply to the Concrit**

> Damn, now I'm all thinky about it.  Your suggestions are awesome.
> 
> I will write more later (I'm on a lunch break right now) but no - it's not supposed to be a very healthy look at the situation.  [...]
> 
> Maybe I should just work on Spanky 2 instead, post this anon and chalk it up as a failed but useful experiment.   
> 
> Okay, lunch is over, I better get moving...thank you so much for this!  And for making me think.  I'll write more later.  I'll think about it during dull client meetings this afternoon!

**And Finally...Acceptance**

I did think about it. While half my brain listened to a meeting about policy changes, the other half hovered on collars and fic and my bruised ego. I thought about whether or not I actually wanted to improve my writing, which was the whole point of having a beta like Emm. I thought about how easy it would be to just not change anything. To say, Okay, I can’t be bothered, I’m gonna post as-is and screw it.

But I also knew that if I spat the dummy then and there, it would undermine our relationship. It would say to Emm, I don’t trust your judgement, and also, I can’t be bothered to put in the work.

So I sucked it up. The email below is the product of my Superego wrestling my Id and my Ego to the ground and armlocking both those bastards.

**Results of Id/Ego v. Superego Wrestling Match**

> Okay, so I thought more during work (irresponsible me! but only in the breaks, I swear).  I'm going to give it a rewrite and see what happens. Because if something's worth doing, it's worth doing in not a completely half-assed manner, at least.  :)
> 
> I did feel like I wanted to put more in about Chris's motivations, so that's first on the list, and flesh out the backstory a bit.  So we'll see how it goes...

And after I’d rewritten, I sent it back to Emm with the following (note the complete mastery of my Bratty Inner Genius by this stage):

> I rewrote. Hopefully better.  Hopefully not worse!!  I went with something more healthy.  Erm, I think, anyway.  What do you reckon?
> 
> I left a bunch of the old stuff with your comments at the end too so I could reply to the comments.
> 
> Thank you again.  You are awesome.

**The “Lumpy Pot” Epiphany**

(Medea) 

“Thank you again. You are awesome.” I sincerely meant it, because by that stage I understood where Emm’s criticisms had come from, how very NOT about me as a person they were, and that she made them to me because she cared about this lumpy pot I’d thrown on the wheel.

In fact, _she cared more than I did,_ and that was an astonishing thing to me. It’s a great gift to have someone care about, live and love your fic as much as you do, and to be prepared to push you to reshape that lumpy pot into…well, not always a Grecian urn, but sometimes a very respectable non-lumpy pot.

**Immovable Object, Draft Two**

> He’s really, really angry.  "I won't," he says.  "I'm not going to do it.  After all of last night--not today as well."
> 
> "Okay," I say, and hug him close.  He's shivering, although he's fully dressed for the shoot, including a jacket.
> 
> "Please don’t make me."  His mouth is muffled in my shoulder.
> 
> "I won’t make you.  You know you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do."
> 
> I have taken my time in breaking him down and building him back up, but sometimes I think I should have simply stayed away.  Could I have stayed away, though?  He was relentless in his pursuit.  And he’s more confident now, less needy, less likely to see slights where none were meant, but his fear at losing the collar has almost become overpowering.
> 
> "We need to talk about this later," I say, and he gets that obstinate look again.  "It shouldn’t be interfering with your career."
> 
> "I don’t care about-–"
> 
> "Don't say that," I tell him immediately.  "Because even if you don’t, I do.  I want you to be successful, and to have choices."
> 
> Finally, I've found the right thing to say, because his face is relaxing, the anger and the fear are leaving his eyes.
> 
> "Because," I say, hit with inspiration, "it reflects on me, too.  Your success."
> 
> "I guess," he says.
> 
> "I know it's new, and we're trying to make it work, but we still have to function.  You know?"  I run my fingers over his collar, and he lifts his chin slightly, leaning closer into me.

And lastly, there is the actual final story, [Immovable Object](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1898730).

**Reflection**

(Medea)

Reading back over this fic now, I'm really happy with how it turned out. I can also see how far I've come as a writer, and how much my relationship with Emm as a beta has developed. These days we have a more 'shorthand' approach to beta work, which is to be expected when you've collaborated creatively with someone for four years. We also have a greater level of trust.

Don’t get me wrong--an email from Emm with feedback on my fics still makes my tummy turn over. Criticism is tough, because my Ego never quits...but concrit has also helped me improve. I value Emm's judgement and her eye and her amazing sounding-board skills, and I particularly value her understanding of story forms. When a story passes my standards _and_ Emm's standards, I know I can put it out there and be proud of it.

That's also not to say that I blindly follow every piece of criticism or every suggestion she makes. Sometimes we disagree, and in those cases it's still up to me to decide whether I'm going to trust my judgement, or Emm's judgement. The great thing, having come through the wringer together, is that I know she's not going to be miffed if I don't take a suggestion.  As Emm always reminds me, it’s my name on the fic, and ultimately it's my creation.

In the case of the Lumpy Pot, I’m very glad I took her advice.

**Reflection II**

(Emmessann)

Medea has a lot to say about the effects my concrit had on her. There's _so much room_ for anxiety on the writer's side of concrit. For me as beta, it's mostly that "Well, this could be it," feeling. The quiet break-up has happened to me before. Predicting "how much crit can this author take? Is there a softer phrasing that might land better?" is a game I don’t play well, and I’m not sure if anyone truly does. For the most part I do my thing, with the best phrasing I’ve got, and let matters progress as they will.

But we survived my clumsy handling of her lumpy pot. I genuinely loved the second draft of Immovable Object, too. The little kink-meme fill grew up a bit, maybe lost some edge but gained some richness. Thankfully, it did seem to please its requester in its new form. It had moved a bit further from the literal request, but some of the new elements turned out to deliver, too.  _(“Chris is still Chris!!!”)_

Most of all, it showed me what was really possible when one piece of art has two brains' attention who both deeply care about its future.

What I realized recently is that after this one milestone, I have never once worried about how Medea would receive the type of concrit I have to give. I've never looked back because I can always trust that she (and several other awesome writers) will hear me out, and still talk to me in the morning. Submitting to criticism is a tremendously brave act. Doing the rewrites that build off of that criticism -- Medea, and my other regular writers, are fearless. Because of them, I can be fearless about giving the best insights I have. 

And this little lumpy-pot kink-meme fill is the moment that started that trust. It was the first moment our work together could have gone really badly. But we survived it, and that led us to a profound level of a writer/developmental beta relationship.

As a beta, I care immensely about my authors' stories, on a different level than a writer or a reader. They are not my babies, but I play a role in their development. _[“Yes, a midwife one” -- Medea]_ And I can afford to give them that kind of devotion, because my small work on each draft is repaid by the progress that’s made on the next revision-- sometimes incalculably so. Once you know that an author will navigate the rough patches with you, it makes the smooth sailing much easier to find.

 


End file.
